Pick two points on an interactive world map and see the distance between them in km, miles, and travel time. Free, fast, and runs in your browser.
The interactive map lets you click any two points on Earth and immediately see the great-circle distance between them, along with estimated flight and driving times. It is ideal for visual planners who prefer maps over typing city names.
All calculations run locally in your browser using the Haversine formula, with coordinates resolved from OpenStreetMap data. Nothing about your selections is stored on a server.
Combine the map with the calculator and route hubs for a complete picture of how distances connect cities, regions, and continents.
Every distance on SnapDistance is computed with the Haversine formula, which measures the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere. The formula uses the latitude and longitude of each city — sourced from OpenStreetMap and Photon — and returns the shortest path along the Earth's surface. This is the same technique used by aviation route planners, maritime navigators, and most modern mapping APIs.
Results are returned in kilometres, miles, and nautical miles. SnapDistance also estimates flight time using a representative cruise speed of approximately 900 km/h plus 30 minutes of taxi, takeoff, and landing overhead. Driving time is approximated by multiplying the great-circle distance by 1.3 (a typical road-network detour factor) and dividing by an average highway speed. These estimates are designed for planning, not for operational navigation.
Because all calculations run client-side in your browser, no city pair you enter is ever sent to a SnapDistance server. The only network requests made by the calculator are to the Photon geocoding API for autocomplete, and (with your consent) to Google Analytics for anonymous usage statistics.
Straight-line distance is the shortest possible separation between two locations. It is the same number you would draw with a ruler on a globe, ignoring roads, oceans, mountains, and political borders. For comparing two cities, two airports, or two coordinates, it is the most consistent and source-of-truth figure.
Real-world routing — the path a car, train, ship, or commercial flight actually follows — is almost always longer. Roads detour around terrain, flights follow air-traffic-control corridors and jet-stream-friendly tracks, and trains follow fixed rights-of-way. As a rule of thumb, driving routes are 1.2–1.5× the straight-line distance, and commercial flights are 1.02–1.10× the great-circle distance for routes longer than 1,000 km.
Knowing both numbers helps you frame a trip correctly: use straight-line distance to compare options at a glance, then switch to a routing service like Google Maps or a flight-search engine when you need exact times.
From this page you can jump directly into the SnapDistance calculator, browse curated city-hub pages for major travel origins like London, New York, Tokyo, Dubai, Paris, and Sydney, or explore country-level route hubs that group hundreds of city-to-city distances by destination country.
If you are researching a specific trip, the comparison pages place two routes side by side so you can quickly see which is shorter, which is likely faster, and how the two relate in terms of timezone shift. The map view lets you click any two points on Earth and see the great-circle distance instantly.
All of this works without any sign-up, runs entirely in your browser, and is free to use as often as you like. Recent searches are remembered locally on your device so you can re-open the last few routes you checked with one click.
Distances are computed with the Haversine formula and city coordinates from OpenStreetMap, so the great-circle figure is accurate to within a few hundred metres for almost any city pair. Flight and driving time estimates are deliberate approximations — flight time uses a representative cruise speed and adds taxi/takeoff overhead, and driving time multiplies straight-line distance by 1.3 to approximate real road routing. Always confirm with a routing service before booking.
Great-circle distance is the shortest path between two points along the surface of the Earth, treating the planet as a sphere. Driving distance follows actual roads, which add detours around terrain, water, and political borders. On most continents, the driving distance is roughly 1.2–1.5× the great-circle distance.
Yes. The calculator, every city-hub page, every country page, the comparison tool, and all guides are free and require no account. There are no usage limits, no paywalls, and no ads.
No. All distance calculations run inside your browser, so the city pairs you enter are never sent to a SnapDistance server. The only data the site can see is anonymous Google Analytics traffic, and only if you accept the analytics cookie when you first visit.
Yes. SnapDistance is a Progressive Web App. Once you have visited the site, you can add it to your home screen on iOS or Android, or install it as a desktop app on Chrome and Edge. The cached pages and the calculator continue to work without an internet connection.